About PimEyes

PIMEYES MANIFESTO

Development of the information technologies have created number of challenges regarding personal data protection. Thousands of people have become victims of identity stealing, revenge porn, stalking etc. Those, who violate human rights in such manner have elaborated advanced tools and particular skills to breach private space of ordinary people. We believe that everyone has the right to find themselves on the Internet and protect their privacy and image. Using the latest technologies, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, we help people find their pictures on the Internet and defend themselves against scammers, identity thieves, or illegal usage of their image. That is why we have created PimEyes - a multi-purpose tool allowing ordinary people people to track down their faces on the Internet, reclaim image rights, and monitor their online presence.

EXPLAINING OF PIMEYES

PimEyes is an online search engine that looks for the web sites based on photos submitted by the users. PimEyes doesn’t look for people, it looks for the web sites. PimEyes doesn’t label any picture based on race, gender, age, or any other feature necessary to identify an individual. Gathering information on individuals is not the goal of the search engine, neither it is designed to do so. The engine gathers information about the URL addresses openly available on the internet.

PimEyes searches for an opened internet and gathers information which is public, not restricted by user, or owner and everyone has right to see it. The database itself consists of coded indexes, where each code is indicating a certain feature. The index is linked to the web site, where photo material with similar index is published. Accordingly, PimEyes database is a puzzle and the photo provided by the user is a key to the puzzle.

Database is technically structured in a manner that the puzzle solving is available only with PimEyes’ unique AI. It is technically and theoretically impossible to reconstruct a single image even in case a leak of the entire database.

PimEyes database is not designed to reconstruct images inside a database. Once the photo is submitted the AI calculates index combination provided by the photo and provides the URL addresses from the database which include those combinations with bigger similarity. Accordingly, users are provided data from the database, however images are displayed from the external sources. PimEyes doesn’t keep the photos used or published by the various websites.

NO HARM PRINCIPLES

We act in accordance make no harm principles, therefore alongside with proposed services, we intend to promote media and internet literacy, principles of ethics and values based on internationally recognized human rights standards as the part of our social responsibility to contribute implementation of ethical practice of using PimEyes technologies.

Alongside the, PimEyes has elaborated and implemented a multistep security protocol which ensures that:

a) The risks of abusing PimEyes’ services are reduced to possible minimum.

b) The data in PimEyes databases, including the information submitted by users is secured in accordance with the highest standards of data security.

c) The members of support team and PROtect agents of PimEyes are trained and working under special terms, which includes non-disclosing the information provided by the users.

To ensure the mentioned objectives PimEyes has elaborated monitoring and evaluation system which includes weekly monitoring of guard and alert images to exclude unauthorized searches for children, women, and girls, as far as the mentioned groups are the most vulnerable to online stalking. Besides of the mentioned, set of indicators of suspicious activities have been elaborated and every user’s activity is closely monitored notwithstanding the fact that PimEyes never checks for the information obtained by the users. Accounts with suspicious behavior are banned temporarily, or permanently.

In case of criminal activity committed by using PimEyes’ services, PimEyes leaves the right to disclose identity of the account owner to law enforcing institutions.

To make PimEyes services less attractive for stalkers, PimEyes has self-restricted it’s service scope. At this moment PimEyes doesn’t crawl social media, or any other owner web site that includes restricted information. Everything what user gets is information which is public, and everyone has right to receive it.

PimEyes has ensured that technical and data security teams are completed with highly ranked professionals, most of them with academic degree in computer sciences. They are regularly trained about new security systems and the company procures top edge data and cyber security solutions. The newest technologies and regular training of the professional team ensures security of PimEyes’ data base in accordance with the highest security standards.

Support and PROtect team employees are also trained. They work under NDA to ensure non-disclosure of the information provided to them by users during their professional activity.

EVERYONE CAN CONTROL THEIR DATA

As far as PimEyes is a public and opened web site search engine, we have introduced free search option, where every user, without subscription, or having even a free account can check their online presence.

We understand that there might be users who are not interested in our services and same time do not wish to be found by our search engine. Therefore, we offer every user a form to preform opt-out, which removes entire index combination related to their photos and blocks it from future processing, or users may remove, and block indexes related to a certain photo by simple click below each free search result.

Both of these options are free and doesn’t require subscription, or any other type of payment.

The requests are reviewed by the data security team every day. Accordingly, they are executed within 24 hours during the working days.

ABOUT THE BRAND

PimEyes is a photo search engine that has been created to be available to everyone. The technology that integrates the face search mechanism with a search engine was designed in 2017. It is now being developed as an advanced self-monitoring, self-protection, and self-image management tool.

WHY DO WE CHARGE PEOPLE FOR USING PIMEYES?

Our top priority in PimEyes is to provide our customers with a high-quality service without selling their data to other entities (e.g. for ads). As you can see on our website, we don’t display any external ads and we care about our customers’ privacy. That is why instead of divulging their data, we charge them for our services, namely for what is most valuable: information about websites that have published their photos and the possibility to access these websites and source images.

WHY DO WE ALLOW SEARCHING ONLY FOR THE USER’S OWN FACE?

Before a user performs a search, we require them to accept the Terms of Service and agree to use a photo of their own face in accordance with our Privacy Policy. We desire people to use our service knowingly - PimEyes is designed to monitor the individual’s own image.

We want our service to be used in a manner that does not affect the rights of third parties (personal rights, copyrights) and generally applicable principles of international law. That is why in our search results there are website addresses, not personal data (because the users know who they are). This is also one of the reasons why we don’t search social media.

We have mentioned the requirement for users to limit searches to their own faces in the Terms&Conditions, Privacy Policy, and consent form that they need to accept before they receive their results. It is important for us that users do not overlook this significant condition.

However, we understand that it is difficult to achieve 100% compliance with our terms of services and therefore we have implemented self-restriction rules mentioned above. Accordingly, even if user will perform search using photos of other people, the only information, what will be available to the user are public, non-restricted web-sites, where everyone is allowed to visit and receive the information from those web-sites without special permission.

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